Whose Land?

Why the Settlements Should Stay

Making the West Bank Judenrein is no way to bring peace.

By Hillel Halkin
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110001769
Wednesday, May 29, 2002 

The settlements! If only they didn't exist! If only Israel 
understood the folly of them! They have been a ruinous drain 
on its resources, a flagrant violation of international law, 
a systematic effort to dispossess the Palestinians, an intolerable 
presence on Palestinian soil, and, in short, "the greatest Israeli 
obstacle to peace," as the New York Times recently put it in 
hardly its first editorial on the subject. For the sake of peace, 
they will have to be uprooted. Such, today, is the conventional 
wisdom even among most of Israel's friends, even among many 
Israelis. Like all wisdom of its kind, it is self-perpetuating. 
And like all wisdom of its kind, it needs a second look.

Such a look might begin with the word settlement itself, which 
implies a small and easily removable community. Most people, when 
they imagine the Palestinian West Bank, in which are to be found 
close to three-quarters of the roughly 175 Jewish settlements 
built on territory occupied by Israel in 1967, and 90% of their 
total population of 250,000, see a series of isolated outposts 
surrounded by hostile Arab towns and villages. Such outposts, 
numbering several hundred inhabitants or fewer, do exist, from the 
Hebron hills in the southern West Bank, traditionally known to 
Jews and Christians as Judea, to the fringes of Jenin in the 
northern West Bank or Samaria. Most of them, however, are 
surrounded by empty space rather than by Arab towns and villages.

But other settlements, as the Times noted in the same editorial, 
are the size of large towns, and some are approaching small cities. 
Ma'aleh Adumim, in the Judean desert east of Jerusalem, has a 
population of 28,000; Ariel, in the foothills east of Tel Aviv, 
18,000; Betar Illit, an ultra-Orthodox community south of 
Jerusalem, has passed 15,000. Standing in the center of such 
places, one has a view not of hostile Palestinians but of Jewish 
houses, streets, parks, shops and businesses as far as the eye 
can see.

If the settlements were a bad idea, they were indeed a great waste 
of public funds. Huge amounts have been invested in them by Israeli 
governments for construction and infrastructure, only a part of 
which has been recovered through the sale of housing, real-estate 
and commercial taxes, and other revenue. And yet, apart from this 
construction having been an important source of income to those 
engaged in it, especially to many thousands of Palestinian workers, 
evacuating the settlements today would be far more expensive than 
building them.

Assuming, for instance, 7,000 dwelling units in Ma'aleh Adumim, 
a suburb populated largely by young families coming from and 
working in Jerusalem, and modestly estimating the price of 
equivalent housing in Jerusalem at $250,000 per family unit, 
the cost of relocating Ma'aleh Adumim's residents, and of paying 
compensation to its shop owners and other businesses, would come 
to over $2 billion. The total cost of evacuating all the 
settlements could easily--talk of ruinous!--exceed $20 billion.

We are assured that Israel will not have to pay for this. 
The international community, it is said, will be glad to finance 
peace by footing the bill and resettling Palestinian refugees in 
the evacuated homes, thus helping to solve two problems at once. 
This, however, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, $20 billion is not 
in evidence. Nor is there likely to be much enthusiasm for writing 
a check in that amount on the part of taxpayers in America, 
Europe and Japan, who have been hearing for the past 35 years 
that the settlements are illegal. Why pay the price of Israel's 
crimes?

That the settlements are illegal, the conventional wisdom says, 
is obvious. But it is far from obvious--even if, like many a 
commonplace, it has been remarked upon so often that it has 
attained the status of a universally acknowledged truth. The case 
for the illegality of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank 
rests largely on a single source: article 49(6) in the fourth 
Geneva Convention of 1949. This article states that an occupying 
military power "shall not deport or transfer part of its own 
civilian population into the territory it occupies." Yet, as 
several international jurists have pointed out, not only has 
Israel "deported" or "transferred" no one to the settlements, 
whose inhabitants are there of their own free will, it is by 
no means clear that Israel was ever, legally, in the position of 
being an occupying power.

This is because, in 1967, Israel had as good a claim as anyone 
to the West Bank, which in effect belonged to no government. 
The Jordanian annexation of the area, while acquiesced in by 
the same Palestinian leadership that had rejected the 1947 U.N. 
partition resolution, was unrecognized by most of the world, 
and Jordan itself had refused to make peace with Israel or to 
consider their joint border more than a temporary cease-fire 
line. A reasonable case could thus be made that, as the sole 
sovereign state to have emerged from British-mandated Palestine, 
Israel had not only the right but the duty to act as the West 
Bank's civil administrator pending determination of the area's 
status.

The conventional wisdom is also wrong in asserting -- a frequently 
made claim -- that continued settlement activity on the part of 
Israel is a violation of the 1993 Oslo accords. The plain fact 
of the matter is that nowhere in that agreement was there any 
reference to the settlements, apart from a single paragraph 
stating that -- along with Jerusalem, refugees, and "other issues 
of common interest" -- their fate was to be settled in final-status 
negotiations. This was hardly an oversight. The Palestinians 
wanted a settlement freeze and fought for one at Oslo; if they 
did not get it, this is only because in the end they accepted the 
Israeli refusal to agree to one. In repeatedly demanding one 
anyway over the ensuing years, it is they, not the Israelis, 
who have gone back on the document they signed. 

And yet whatever the legality of the settlements, the debate over 
it is incapable of adjudication, since international law, 
especially with regard to disputes between countries, remains in 
large measure a fiction lacking courts to interpret it impartially. 
Nor, it must be admitted, did questions of legality especially 
exercise Israel when it established the settlements in the first 
place. It is therefore worth recalling why, when, and where it 
did establish them.

Even though settling Jews on available land was a Zionist reflex, 
if not the supreme imperative of Jewish policy in the historic 
land of Israel from the late 19th century on, the immediate 
reaction of the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Levi 
Eshkol to Israel's stunning victory in the Six Day War of June 
1967 was to bar Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Caught by 
surprise both by the war and by the extent of the Arab defeat, 
the Eshkol government adopted this position in the expectation 
that peace talks with Jordan would soon commence and lead to 
the return of most of the area to King Hussein. Apart from 
annexing East Jerusalem, Israel undertook no settlement activity 
at all in the first months after the fighting, during which the 
government countenanced, at most, several privately initiated 
ventures on the Golan Heights and in the Etsion Bloc southwest 
of Jerusalem -- where, in 1948, a cluster of kibbutzim had been 
destroyed by the Arab Legion after fierce resistance. (Both areas 
had great emotional resonance for the Israeli public, the Golan 
because of long years of Syrian shelling from it, the "Bloc" as 
a symbol of Jewish heroism and loss in the War of Independence.) 
Similarly, when, in April 1968, 10 months after the Six-Day war, 
a group of religious Jews moved into and refused to leave a hotel 
in the Judean city of Hebron, in which an ancient Jewish 
community had existed until driven out by a pogrom in 1929, 
no action was taken to evict them. 

But by the spring of 1968, Israel's situation had changed. 
The "three no's" -- to peace with Israel, to recognition of 
Israel, and to negotiations with Israel -- of the pan-Arab 
conference in Khartoum that ended in September 1967, plus the 
passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 in November, 
deliberately phrased to call for Israeli withdrawal to "secure 
and recognized borders" from "occupied" rather than from "the 
occupied" territories, had convinced Israel of two things: 
that peace talks were not imminent, and that, were they to 
become so, the world would agree to Israeli retention of a 
minimum of territory needed for its security. The result was 
the "Allon Plan," named for Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon. 
Israel's first formulation of a coherent West Bank strategy, 
it called for Jewish settlements surrounding Jerusalem, in the 
foothills of Samaria just east of the 1967 border, and in the 
sparsely inhabited Jordan Valley -- and nowhere else. Eighty 
percent of the West Bank, including its most heavily populated 
regions, would remain out of bounds to Jews.

The Allon Plan, though it came under heavy domestic criticism 
as a British-Mandate-style "White Paper" banning Jews from 
living in their own homeland, determined settlement policy 
until 1974. Then, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, which ended 
with a battered and disillusioned Israel seemingly further away 
from peace than ever, a first wedge was driven in it. Demanding 
that the government of Yitzhak Rabin recognize the right of Jews 
to settle anywhere in Judea and Samaria, a militant group named 
Gush Emunim staged a "live-in" at Sebastia, the site of the 
biblical city of Shomron. The Rabin government, though at first 
inclined to evict the squatters, was persuaded by Defense Minister 
Shimon Peres to negotiate with them, leading to the founding of 
the settlement of Kedumim in the heart of Samaria. Subsequently, 
the Allon Plan's restrictions on Jewish settlement began to 
crumble.

Nevertheless, at the time of the momentous defeat of Labor in 
the elections of 1977 by Menachem Begin's Likud party, there 
were barely 10,000 Jews living in the West Bank. Soon after 
these elections, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem 
on his peace overture. Had there been at this time the slightest 
willingness on the part of Jordanians or Palestinians to join 
the Egyptian-Israeli peace talks, these few settlers would have 
been an obstacle to nothing. (Their number was indeed only 
slightly greater than the number of Israelis in the Sinai 
who would be evacuated by the Begin government in 1981.) But the 
Jordanians stood aloof from the proposal for West Bank autonomy 
made by Begin to Sadat; the Palestine Liberation Organization 
assailed it; and more and more settlers, encouraged by Likud 
policy, began moving into the West Bank.

Were they an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians? 
The historical record shows that, at least up to the Oslo 
Agreement of 1993, they were the opposite: not an obstacle but 
an impetus to peace. This can be confirmed, first of all, 
empirically. From 1977 on, as West Bank settlement grew by 
leaps and bounds, passing the 100,000 mark in 1990, Arab and 
Palestinian attitudes toward Israel became steadily more flexible. 
The year 1979 marked the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace 
treaty. In 1985 the PLO, which had hitherto called for the 
destruction of Israel and the establishment of a "secular, 
democratic" (i.e., non-Jewish) state in all of Palestine, 
suggested forming a joint delegation with Jordan to negotiate 
the return of the West Bank and Gaza Strip alone; in 1988, 
it announced its acceptance of Resolution 242 and its willingness 
to recognize Israel; in 1992, it went to Oslo with the Rabin 
government.

Of course, there were other reasons for this, too. They included 
the peace between Israel and Egypt; the defeat of the PLO in 
Lebanon in 1982; the PLO's financial and political debacle in 
the Gulf War; the waning of the first intifada, which broke out 
in 1987 and had begun to subside by the early 1990s; and the 
growing popularity in the occupied territories of Islamic groups 
challenging PLO supremacy. But of all these factors, it may be 
that nothing convinced the PLO that time was against it so much 
as the growth of the settlements. As long as the number of 
people in them was negligible, they did not seem likely to 
prevent Israel from ever surrendering control of the West Bank. 
Now that they were expanding by 10,000 inhabitants a year, 
the PLO feared the approach of a point of no return. This fear 
was, in the 1980s and early '90s, a factor working for, 
not against, peace.

One might consider a counterfactual proposition. Suppose that 
every Israeli government, from 1967 until the present, had done 
what the conventional wisdom says it should have done. Suppose 
it had declared, "Not a single Jew will be allowed to live in 
the West Bank until there is peace, and we intend to hold the 
area in escrow for the Palestinians for as long as this takes. 
Let it be 10 years. Let it be 20. Let it be 50 or 100. The Arab 
world can rest assured that, whenever it is tired of fighting, 
it will get this territory back as we received it, free of Jews."

Would this have hastened peace talks or moderated the PLO? 
Why should it have? Common sense dictates that the Palestinian 
and Arab reaction would have been, "Well, then, there's no need 
to hurry. We have all the time in the world. First, let us go on 
trying to destroy Israel. If we succeed, so much the better. 
If we fail, we will have lost nothing."

In point of fact, however, Israel could never have kept such a 
promise even had it made it. As the months after the June 1967 
victory lengthened into years, no Israeli government would have 
lasted if it told its people: "No matter how long the Arabs 
refuse to make peace with us, you are forever barred from living 
in any part of the land of Israel beyond the 1967 borders that 
the Arabs refuse to recognize." The Allon Plan was initially 
acceptable to most Israelis because, while pragmatic, it did not 
in principle deny the right of Jews to live beyond those borders. 
A policy of declaring the West Bank entirely Judenrein would 
have toppled Labor and brought the Likud to power well before 
1977.

There is indeed something unacceptable about telling Jews that 
although they may live anywhere they wish, in New York and 
London, in Moscow and Buenos Aires, there is one part of the 
world they may not live in -- namely, Judea and Samaria, those 
regions of the land of Israel most intimately connected with 
the Bible, with the Second Temple period, and with Jewish 
historical memory, and most longed-for by the Jewish people 
over the ages. It is a matter of historical irony that, when 
Israel's 1948 War of Independence ended, it found the Jews 
heavily concentrated in the narrow lowland of Palestine's 
coastal strip, where the biblical Philistines once lived, 
and the Arabs mainly in the hill country of the interior, 
where the ancient Jews once lived. Yet this is also a matter 
of historical consistency. All over the world, and throughout 
time, more technologically advanced peoples have ended up 
occupying the plains and valleys, where a high degree of 
agricultural, political, and military organization is most 
effective, leaving the hills to their less-advanced rivals. 
In biblical times, the hill people of Palestine were the 
Israelites. In 1948, they were the Palestinians.

Be that as it may, Jordan, Israel's main military adversary 
in 1948, saw to it that the West Bank it annexed had not a Jew 
in it. It was thus inevitable, following the 1967 victory, 
that there should have been widespread sentiment in Israel 
for opening Judea and Samaria to Jewish settlement. The ensuing 
debate had not two sides but three, which might be labeled the 
"pros," the "cons," and the "halfways." In simplified form, 
combining arguments that received different degrees of prominence 
at different times and in different circumstances, the debate 
went like this:

Pros: "Jews have an absolute right to live anywhere in their 
historic homeland. For a Jewish government to deny this right 
would be monstrous."

Cons: "There is a difference between a right and its 
implementation. In theory, the Palestinian refugees also have 
the right to return to the homes they fled in 1948, but in 
practice there are good grounds for opposing this. The same 
can be said of Jews and the West Bank. Jewish settlements there 
will take away more land from a Palestinian people that already 
lost most of its territory in 1948. They will create resentment 
and anger among this people and inflame anti-Israel feeling. 
And they will make it impossible to exchange the West Bank for 
peace, thus precluding a political solution. Israel can exist 
without Judea and Samaria. For the Palestinians, this is all 
they have left. Keeping it for them is both the prudent and 
the moral thing to do."

Pros: "Israel cannot exist without Jews in Judea and Samaria. 
This is so physically, because a return to the 1967 borders, 
which at their narrowest left the country six miles wide between 
the West Bank and the sea, will render it militarily indefensible. 
And it is so psychologically, because, while you can divide 
the land of Israel on a map, you cannot divide it as a concept. 
Either it belongs to the Jewish people or it does not. The Arabs 
say it does not. If Jews concede today that they have no place 
in Judea and Samaria, they will concede tomorrow that they have 
none in Haifa and Tel Aviv."

Cons: "That is absurd. Jews are in Haifa and Tel Aviv. They need 
no historical justification for being there. And there are other 
ways of making Israel defensible. A Palestinian state can be 
demilitarized. Modern technology permits early-warning systems 
and military responses that make distances on the ground 
irrelevant."

Pros: "Demilitarization will be a farce if Israel does not 
control the Palestinian border with the Arab world in the 
Jordan Valley. So will any early-warning system. Arab tanks 
could enter a Palestinian state through that valley and cut 
Israel in half literally overnight."

Halfways: "That is why there is a need to compromise on 
something like the Allon Plan. It is the optimal solution."

Cons: "It is no solution at all. Neither the Palestinians nor 
any Arab country will accept the Allon Plan, or anything less 
than a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines. No settlements at 
all -- that is the only game in town."

Pros: "You've just given the best reason for settlements 
everywhere. Why forbid Jews to live in their own land if a 
defensible Israel will not result from a full withdrawal in 
any case?"

Halfways: "You're forgetting demography. There are two million 
Arabs living in the West Bank. Adding them to the population 
of Israel would be the end of Israel as a Jewish state."

Pros: "You don't have to add them. They can be citizens of 
Jordan or of Palestine."

Cons: "You mean Arab Bantus in an Israeli Bantustan."

Pros: "We mean Israelis and Palestinians living together. 
If they can do so on the old Israeli side of the 1967 border, 
why can't they do so on the old Jordanian side?"

Cons: "There is no analogy. The Palestinians in Israel were 
there before the Jews. The Israelis on the West Bank are 
intruders. They have robbed the West Bankers of their property. 
They constitute an insufferable provocation. 'They deprive the 
Palestinians' -- permit me to quote from a New York Times 
editorial -- 'of prime land and water, break up Palestinian 
geographic continuity, are hard to defend against Palestinian 
attack, and complicate the establishment of a clear, secure 
Israeli border.' How can you argue with that?"

Perhaps by beginning with the Palestinians' own statistics, 
supplied by Jad Ishak, director of the Palestinian-run Applied 
Research Institute in Jerusalem, who has served as an adviser 
on the settlements to the Palestinian Authority: Jewish settlers 
in the West Bank number, as I have said, some 225,000 people -- 
or about a tenth of the area's total population. (By comparison, 
the one million Palestinians now living in Israel form close 
to a fifth of its population.) According to Palestinian figures, 
the built-up area currently occupied by the settlements 
constitutes 2% of the West Bank. Another 2.2% has been set 
apart by the Israeli government for future expansion, and an 
additional 1.5% has been used for 190 miles of roads leading to, 
or connecting, the settlements. All in all, the Jewish tenth 
of the West Bank's population lives on 1/50th of its area, 
has title to another 1/50th, and travels on a special 1/65th.

Whatever the percentages, the Palestinians claim that all land 
used by the settlements has been stolen from them and must be 
relinquished. Israel, for its part, contends that this land 
has been acquired legally. Both sides agree that its transfer 
to Jewish ownership has been conducted by three basic mechanisms.

One has been direct sales by Palestinian owners to Israeli buyers. 
(Many of these, the Palestinians say, were fraudulent or performed 
under duress.) A second has been the allotment, by Israel to the 
settlers, of unowned or former Jordanian state-owned land. 
(The Palestinians insist that Israel had no proprietary rights 
to either.) A third has been the confiscation of private 
Palestinian land for "public purposes." (Which, the Palestinians 
contend, has consistently meant only Jewish purposes.) Although 
neither Palestinian nor Israeli sources offer a breakdown by 
category, the last-named confiscations probably comprises 
the smallest of the three. 

The Palestinians also point out that the settlements occupy far 
more land per capita than do Palestinian towns and cities, 
whose built-up area, for a population 10 times greater, is less 
than twice as large--a disparity in population density that is 
due partly to larger Palestinian families' living in more 
crowded quarters and partly to the settlements' having more 
extensive private and public spaces. Still, the 5.7% of the 
West Bank apportioned to settlement activity now and in the 
future, while not insignificant, hardly constitutes a major 
takeover of what the Times calls "prime Palestinian land."

The same holds true for water. Although many Palestinian 
localities do suffer acute water shortages during the dry 
summer months, the settlements, despite their far greater per 
capita domestic consumption of water, are not directly to blame. 
Unlike the Palestinians, the settlers are for the most part 
linked to the central Israeli water grid and do not pump their 
water from local wells, and Israeli restrictions on Palestinian 
pumping, however onerous, have been aimed at protecting Israeli 
aquifers in general rather than at diverting water specifically 
to the settlements. If the Jewish inhabitants of the settlements 
were all moved to the coastal plain tomorrow, they would be 
drawing the same amount of water from these aquifers as today.

On the other hand, the settlements do, as the Times says, 
"break up Palestinian geographic continuity," since no part of 
the West Bank is without them. The Times is right, too, that 
many of them, because small and reached by vulnerable roads, 
"are hard to defend against Palestinian attack." It has been 
the need to protect them against such attack that has led to 
the proliferation of Israeli army patrols and military 
checkpoints that Palestinian drivers and their passengers, 
often held up several times in the course of short journeys, 
have found particularly harassing and humiliating. Certainly, 
a permanent situation in which this continued would be 
incompatible with Palestinian sovereignty in any meaningful 
sense. No Palestinian state could allow the Israeli army to 
be everywhere in its territory (as opposed to in limited 
bases in the Jordan Valley). The Times is also right that 
the settlements, in their present locations, "complicate the 
establishment of a clear, secure Israeli border." In fact, 
if such a border had to include all the settlements within it, 
it would be impossible to draw. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's 
current "interim agreement" proposal, which calls for keeping 
all the settlements under Israeli control while giving only 
40% of the West Bank to the Palestinians, illustrates the 
dilemma. The border would have to take in large amounts of 
land not belonging to the settlements in order to encompass 
them all. The noncontiguous cantons thereby left to the 
Palestinians would indeed be the equivalent of Bantustans, 
and there is no conceivable reason why the Palestinians should 
accept them. 

To sum up: The great majority of the Israeli settlements in 
the West Bank are not there because of Israel's original 
post-1967 policy and would not have been built at all had 
the Arabs been prepared to negotiate a peace treaty in the 
aftermath of the 1967 war. They are not necessarily illegal, 
and they have probably, over the years, furthered peace more 
than they have hindered it. Relocating their inhabitants would 
cost enormous sums. Moreover, they express a deep Jewish 
imperative that cannot be challenged without calling into 
question the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine that 
validates the state of Israel. And although many of them are 
built on land taken from the Palestinians against their will, 
their physical dimension is not intolerable from a Palestinian 
point of view.

What is intolerable is both the discriminatory asymmetry behind 
the settlements -- that is, the assumption that, whereas Jews 
have a right to live in all of the historic land of Israel, 
Palestinian refugees do not have a right to live in all of 
historic Palestine -- and the practical consequences of 
Palestinian hostility to them. If not for such hostility, 
no Israeli army would be needed to defend them, and if no 
Israeli army were needed to defend them, they could exist in 
a Palestinian state. 

Over a year and a half into the cruelest fighting that the 
Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine has known, and in which the 
settlers have been a main target of Palestinian violence, 
the notion that they could live in a Palestinian state may 
seem laughably quixotic. This may be what it is. But if it is, 
so is the notion of a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace (as 
opposed to either a permanently ongoing conflict or a tense 
state of nonbelligerency with closed borders and no economic 
or other relationships). Is it possible, after all, to imagine 
a Palestine and Israel with friendly relations and open borders, 
tourism and trade, Palestinian workers coming every day to 
earn their livelihood in Israel, Israeli and Palestinian 
products being exchanged back and forth, and over a million 
Palestinian citizens of Israel regularly hosting and visiting 
friends and families in a Palestinian West Bank in which no Jews 
are allowed to live?

It has been suggested that, although Jews might indeed live 
in a Palestinian state some day, the currently inflamed emotions 
on both sides, and the extreme antisettler sentiments of the 
Palestinians, make speaking of this at the present moment an 
instance of placing the cart before the horse. First, the two 
peoples must be separated, with Israelis on one side of a 
recognized border and Palestinians on the other. Then, as the 
old passions subside and the wounds of enmity are healed, 
they can begin to mix again.

Good fences, in other words, will make good neighbors. And yet 
the idea that the best way of enabling Jews to live in Judea and 
Samaria is to begin by removing 225,000 of them from there 
is not only curiously Rube Goldbergish, it will not even lead 
to the desired separation, since there will still be over a 
million Palestinians, most of them identified with the 
Palestinian state, living in Israel. If the purpose of 
evacuating Jewish settlers to the Israeli side of the border 
is an amicable divorce, this should logically be accompanied 
by moving Israel's Arabs to the Palestinian side. Those who 
attack the asymmetrical injustice of granting Jewish settlers 
a historical right denied to Palestinian refugees overlook 
the similar injustice of relocating the settlers alone.

Perfect symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians is no longer 
attainable. It was proposed in 1947 by the United Nations, 
which voted to divide Mandate Palestine in half, and rejected 
then by the Arabs. But without some symmetry, an Israeli-
Palestinian reconciliation is unattainable, too. One element in 
achieving it might therefore be to let the 225,000 settlers 
remain in a Palestinian state while allowing a similar number 
of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel and fairly 
compensating all those who cannot. (This might also be a 
far better use of $20 billion.) To prevent the returnees from 
adversely affecting Israel's demographic balance, it would 
then be necessary to create another symmetry: Just as the 
Jewish settlers and their offspring in a Palestinian state 
could live there as permanent residents while remaining Israeli 
citizens and voting in Israeli elections, so returning 
Palestinian refugees resettled in Israel would remain citizens 
of Palestine.

Is it conceivable, after the events of the last year and a half, 
that Jewish settlers would be prepared to risk their lives in 
a Palestinian state? That would depend on many things, most of 
all on whether this state could guarantee their safety and 
enable them to live normally. As a collective body, the settlers 
have, over the years, exhibited a remarkable courage and 
attachment to their homes, which suggests that many of them 
would be prepared to try braving such an arrangement. Amid the 
nasty demonization of the settlers that has taken place in the 
world media, the astounding fact has gone largely unnoticed that 
their population in the West Bank, even over the past 18 months, 
during which they have been shot at daily on the roads and 
lived in perpetual insecurity, has grown faster than the 
population of Israel in general, increasing in 2001 by 5%. 
Although, needless to say, they would prefer the protection of 
the Israeli army to the protection of the Palestinian police, 
they will not necessarily cut and run if, as part of a larger 
resolution, the army pulls out.

A bigger question is the Palestinians themselves. While there 
will always be militants among them who will want the settlers 
out under any circumstances (and the Jews out of Tel Aviv and 
Haifa), these may be controllable if a clear majority of 
Palestinians desire -- as they do not today -- to let the 
settlers live in peace. To do so, they would have to be 
convinced that this is fair and beneficial to themselves.

Fairness is a matter of the right symmetries. But the benefits 
of open borders, with Jews and Arabs living on both sides of 
them, would be much greater for Palestinians than for Israelis. 
Israel can prosper without Palestine. A Palestinian state without 
Israel to employ its labor force and buy its agricultural 
products will continue to be an economic basket case. And a 
Palestinian state separated from a Jewish state by a wall, 
literal or figurative, will mean a Palestinian people walled 
off from itself.

Ultimately, though, the benefit would be great for both sides. 
It would enable each to live in its own state and under its 
own government while together inhabiting one country that is 
an indivisible geographical and historical unit and inalienable 
to the memories of both. What matters most to Jews is not that 
they rule over an undivided land of Israel, but that they be 
allowed to be freely at home in it. What matters most to Arabs 
in Palestine, one trusts, is the same thing.

Of course, this may be a utopian fantasy. Whether or not to 
explore it represents a crossroads that Palestinian and Israeli 
negotiators will have to come to. It is noteworthy that, thus far, 
official Israeli and Palestinian positions have simply ignored 
the possibility of Jewish settlers living under Palestinian 
sovereignty, which may be taken either as an indication that 
neither side rules it out or as an indication that neither 
side thinks it remotely feasible.

It would also, if it came to that, represent a crossroads for the 
Israeli public. Since the inception of the Zionist project, 
two alternative models have competed for adoption, often 
confusingly and without a sufficiently clear sense of their mutual 
contradictoriness: that of Jewish-Arab separation and that of 
Jewish-Arab integration. It may well be the case -- as it has given 
every sign of being so far -- that the latter idea consists of 
too much romance and too little realism. What needs to be asked 
is whether it could be given one last, comprehensive chance.

One thing should be clear. A West Bank without Jews means a 
Palestine and Israel without a normal relationship. If this is 
what it comes to, Israel will have to ask many or most of the 
settlers to pack their bags and will then withdraw to a defensive 
line of its own choosing, which will not be that of 1967 and 
will not meet Palestinian demands. After that, the fences will 
go up. They will not make good neighbors.
----------
Mr. Halkin is author of "Across the Sabbath River: In Search of 
a Lost Tribe of Israel," forthcoming in August from Houghton 
Mifflin, and a contributor to Commentary, in whose June issue 
this article appears.